"In the process of writing the book, Grann said, through all the archival work, there’s 'a kind of relationship with these documents that you begin to develop as you become more familiar with them, and as you hold them, and as you look at them.' He likened it to the relationship you develop as you speak to someone, face to face, in an interview; it’s more than you could ever get over email. 'I thought the *handwriting* in that ledger was revealing,' he said. 'It was just a simple word. And I just kept thinking, "Who was that bureaucrat who kept writing this word 'dead'?" And I just would look at the handwriting, and that’s all they wrote, and in that word it contained volumes of hidden history, suffering, death, poisonings — souls.'"

"Each of the startups has built a functional pilot plant to prove their technology, with the ability to capture hundreds of kg of CO2. And all boast that their tech is modular, meaning they can build a direct air capture plant as small or large as somebody is ready to pay for. Even at $50 per metric ton of capturing emissions, if we have to capture as much as 10 billion metric tons by 2050, we are looking at spending $500 billion each year capturing carbon dioxide from the air. It seems outrageous, but it may not be if climate change’s other damages are put in perspective—and that’s what these startups are betting on."

"Many believe that the station is a hybrid of two things. The constant drone is just a marker, saying 'this frequency is mine, this frequency is mine…' to stop people from using it. It only becomes a numbers station in moments of crisis, such as if Russia were invaded. Then it would function as a way to instruct their worldwide spy network and military forces on standby in remote areas. After all, this is a country around 70 times the size of the UK."

"There was a lot of buzz about who was up for the spot. Why do you think you beat out the competition?"
"I’m not sure I did. It was a nice old-fashioned round of media gossip—it felt very 10 years ago, which was refreshing. I think people are strongly and deeply attached to Styles as an entity. Whether they love it because they care passionately about fashion or society or capitalism, or they hate it for all those reasons, it’s a part of people’s lives. I appreciate all those emotions."

"'I think it says so much about how we just accept and move on, and I think for a long time, I just thought, "Well, he didn’t rape me,"' said the woman who alleged being grabbed at an industry party in 2011. 'But I remember it vividly, it impacted me, and I feel uneasy recalling it. I just feel this major sense that I’m not the only one. I feel really grateful for the cultural reckoning that’s happening.'"

"Once they have selected a tree they like, they harvest bud sticks and start making copies. Apples don’t grow true to seed, meaning that if Brown and Maloney plant the seeds of that favored tree they’re unlikely to match the magic of the chosen apple. The apples that show up in stores—Red Delicious, Granny Smith, McIntosh, Macoun, Cortland, Honeycrisp, Empire, Gala—are all produced by clones of the first tree that produced each variety. 'If you get a McIntosh apple, it derives from the apple in the 1700s,' says Brown. 'That’s what’s neat. Clonal propagation freezes it in time.'"

"The way it works is that you start with the last two neurons, and figure out just how wrong they were: how much of a difference is there between what the excitement numbers should have been and what they actually were? When that’s done, you take a look at each of the connections leading into those neurons—the ones in the next lower layer—and figure out their contribution to the error. You keep doing this until you’ve gone all the way to the first set of connections, at the very bottom of the network. At that point you know how much each individual connection contributed to the overall error, and in a final step, you change each of the weights in the direction that best reduces the error overall. The technique is called 'backpropagation' because you are 'propagating' errors back (or down) through the network, starting from the output. The incredible thing is that when you do this with millions or billions of images, the network starts to get pretty good at saying whether an image has a hot dog in it. And what’s even more remarkable is that the individual layers of these image-recognition nets start being able to 'see' images in sort of the same way our own visual system does. That is, the first layer might end up detecting edges, in the sense that its neurons get excited when there are edges and don’t get excited when there aren’t; the layer above that one might be able to detect sets of edges, like corners; the layer above that one might start to see shapes; and the layer above that one might start finding stuff like 'open bun' or 'closed bun', in the sense of having neurons that respond to either case. The net organizes itself, in other words, into hierarchical layers without ever having been explicitly programmed that way."

"Every writer does some version of this: gathering, assessing, sorting, writing. But McPhee takes it to an almost-superhuman extreme. 'If this sounds mechanical,' McPhee writes of his method, 'its effect was absolutely the reverse. If the contents of the seventh folder were before me, the contents of twenty-nine other folders were out of sight. Every organizational aspect was behind me. The procedure eliminated nearly all distraction and concentrated just the material I had to deal with in a given day or week. It painted me into a corner, yes, but in doing so it freed me to write.'"

"It’s time for men to learn about and be interested in the lives and experiences of women. If you are an editor and someone pitches you a story on gender, don’t dismiss it as a women’s story. See it as a story about the human experience, about power, about politics, about everything gender touches and is touched by. If you come across a story about gender, about a woman, don’t click away because you think it’s not relevant to you. You share the world with us. We are relevant to you."

"Now the tier is about eight feet high, and I’ll be up on a ladder. The next level will be light, bulky things such as laundry hampers, cushions, and plant racks. At this point there will be a few inches open to the roof, and I’ll finish the tier with maybe an ironing board and any other flat and light stuff I can find, like bed rails. When I’m finished I should have a uniform and neat tier from floor to ceiling with no gaps or open spaces anywhere. A well-built tier is a beautiful thing to see and lots of fun to make. It’s basically a real-life, giant Tetris game with profound physical exertion incorporated into the mix. Because I have a picture of everything in the house in my head, I’ll often leave the truck to fetch a particular piece for a particular spot."

"For Lamport, this is a failure of education. Though programming was born in mathematics, it has since largely been divorced from it. Most programmers aren’t very fluent in the kind of math—logic and set theory, mostly—that you need to work with TLA+. 'Very few programmers—including very few teachers of programming—understand the very basic concepts and how they’re applied in practice. And they seem to think that all they need is code,' Lamport says. 'The idea that there’s some higher level than the code in which you need to be able to think precisely, and that mathematics actually allows you to think precisely about it, is just completely foreign. Because they never learned it.' Lamport sees this failure to think mathematically about what they’re doing as the problem of modern software development in a nutshell: The stakes keep rising, but programmers aren’t stepping up—they haven’t developed the chops required to handle increasingly complex problems. 'In the 15th century,' he said, 'people used to build cathedrals without knowing calculus, and nowadays I don’t think you’d *allow* anyone to build a cathedral without knowing calculus. And I would hope that after some suitably long period of time, people won’t be allowed to write programs if they don’t understand these simple things.'"

"Today, House Hunters, like all HGTV shows, follows a formula as inflexible as the Latin Mass. You meet the buyers (usually a couple), learn where they live and what their budget is, and watch as they describe marriage-busting differences of opinion in a way that makes them look like they’re choosing what to watch on Netflix. He’s the breadwinner who wants to live close to work; she’s an at-home mom who wants to live in a far-off suburb. She’s a spender; he’s a saver. What they need is a post-nup; what they get is an expensive house an hour from his job, because HGTV women tend to win these quarrels, although he will usually get some concession — a north-facing patio so he won’t sweat like a dog when he’s out grilling; a three-car garage. By the time we bid them farewell, they’re in the great room, sipping white wine from giant, reality-TV wineglasses and purring like kittens."

"In recent years, FEMA has continued to build out its preparedness infrastructure; it now runs eight major logistics centers scattered across the country, as well as 50 additional supply caches belonging to its National Disaster Medical System and 252 pre-positioned containers of disaster supplies scattered across 14 states. It has nearly 750,000 square feet of warehouses in two locations outside Washington, DC, alone. The agency’s secret facilities continue to exist in plain sight. On its website you’ll find a fact sheet on 'Mt. Weather Emergency Operations Center' that lists a lot of mundane details about its motor pool and 280-seat café but nothing about the massive underground city buried in the greenstone mountain. Instead, it offers a single throwaway line that’d be easy to overlook if you didn’t know what it really meant: 'The MWEOC supports a variety of disaster response and continuity missions, mostly classified.'"

"After winning his second N.B.A. championship last June, Mr. James was interviewed on television. He said: 'I’m LeBron James. From Akron, Ohio. From the inner city. I am not even supposed to be here.' Twitter and other social networks erupted with criticism. How could such a supremely gifted person, identified from an absurdly young age as the future of basketball, claim to be an underdog? The more I look at the data, the more it becomes clear that Mr. James’s accomplishments are more exceptional than they appear to be at first. Anyone from a difficult environment, no matter his athletic prowess, has the odds stacked against him."

"VERDICT: The Lakers keep their four best young players, LaVar Ball, and enough cap space for LeBron and two other All-Stars. Brooklyn turns a lousy two-year deal (Lin) into a horrific three-year deal (Deng), but gets rewarded with a sweet draft pick and a four-month taste of Randle. Like when you’re getting an ice cream from a good place and they let you try different flavors with the little spoons. *Sure, I’d love to try the Julius Randle!*"

"When an FBI agent is interviewing you, assume that that agent is exquisitely prepared. They probably already have proof about the answer of half the questions they're going to ask you. They have the receipts. They've listened to the tapes. They've read the emails. Recently. You, on the other hand, haven't thought about Oh Yeah That Thing for months or years, and you routinely forget birthdays and names and whether you had a doctor's appointment today and so forth. So, if you go in with 'I'll just tell the truth', you're going to start answering questions based on your cold-memory unrefreshed holistic general concept of the subject, like an impressionistic painting by a dim third-grader. Will you say 'I really don't remember' or 'I would have to look at the emails' or 'I'm not sure'? That would be smart. But we've established you're not smart, because you've set out to tell the truth to the FBI. You're dumb."

"Setting ticket prices as high as possible isn't always the best strategy. 'In some cases you keep them the same or lower the prices,' Eglen said. 'By being smart at what you're doing, you can make more money. It's not necessarily by raising prices.' A team, especially a mediocre one, can make more money by filling its venue via cheaper tickets. At least in theory, those fans that do come will buy food, drinks, merchandise, programs, pay for parking – the ancillary streams of money teams count on in addition to tickets, Eglen said. Simply raising prices would mean empty arenas and stadiums for many teams. 'They would like to fill the seats as much as raise the ticket prices,' he said. 'Most places know what it's worth to have people in the seats. The teams are very aware the fans are driving the team. They're not interested in trying to gouge every last dime.'"

"NBA people love to complain about AAU basketball and the many ways it hurts American players. However, the complaints of a multibillion-dollar industry about the way its workforce is trained ring a bit hollow. They have the money to fix it. There’s a lot that NBA teams can learn from MLS. FC Dallas doesn’t care if a particular MLS draft is weak. It isn’t trying to find the next great soccer players. It’s trying to create them."

"Thompson, a seven-year veteran, said he has recalibrated his body expectations after all the wear and tear from his time spent in the league. 'You're never healthy,' Thompson said. 'When you play, what, five years straight, you'll never be 100 percent again. That's out the door. Maybe [Cavs rookie] Cedi [Osman] is 100 percent, but he's played a lot of high competition FIBA. So he might not be all right.'"

"We do speak Spanish, but in fact, in this pueblo they actually speak a language called [A soft bristling of summer wind through saltwater reeds]. I speak a little, my wife speaks it fluently — hey, honey, remember our tour guide [The experience of waking while in a dream, only to realize you’re still dreaming]? Wasn’t he hilarious? Yes! Be right there! I’m talking to Shawn, with his son — I’m sorry, I forgot again — was it 'Cardboard Box'?"

"Restaurants, by their nature, are really good at some kinds of food, much less good at others. The baked potato is very ill-suited to restaurant-style preparation methods. It takes a long time to cook, but unlike many long-cooking foods, such as stew or soup, it can't be prepared in advance and then reheated. (The outside, which should be the best part, would get tough and leathery.) The baked potato is best when served on the instant, but unless the restaurant had a whole oven devoted to potatoes in different stages of doneness, circulating in and out in shifts through the day, and unless they invested the attention and trouble to keep track of all those potatoes, putting in new ones and taking out the old ones every half hour or so, they wouldn't be able to produce a well-baked potato at the moment they needed to deliver it to the table. And if the restaurant did go to all that trouble, what then? They wouldn't be able to charge enough to pay them back for the time and trouble, because it is just a potato, and who is going to pay a lot of money for a potato? So baked potatoes are a dish that you can do at home better than a restaurant can, and you might as well."

"The melancholy lullaby your great grandmother used to sing to you in a language that you never learned. Vocals by your great grandmother. You turn to your companion to comment on the strangeness of this, but he is crying. You’ve never seen him cry before, and he never met your great grandmother. You wonder what he hears, but are too afraid to ask."

"There’s a key advantage to studying donated blood and blood donors to learn about infectious pathogens: it’s one of the few situations where scientists can look at a disease before symptoms start. The donors appear healthy—otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to donate blood at all. That gives scientists a unique opportunity to see what an infection does in the body in the absence of any clinical symptoms, says Mars Stone, a scientist with the Blood Systems Research Institute and the REDS-III program. They can find out, for example, how many people who have an infection actually get sick as a result of it. 'In very few other contexts would you be able to have samples before a clinical outcome,' she says. 'Without donor screening, the only people you study are the people presenting with disease. The samples from before that are really only available through blood donation.'"

"'People should follow the art they are attracted to,' Cuchna says. 'There is a reason that album or painting is resonating with you. I know from experience that if you don’t give it your full attention, you won’t get everything you could get out of it. I hope Dissect can provide the structure for someone to take that time, or inspire them to create that structure in their own life.'"

"SECOND MEXICAN: Will it work? This can’t weigh more than forty or fifty pounds.
FIRST MEXICAN: The sack weighs sixty pounds.
SECOND MEXICAN: I understand now. That is the exact number of pounds required to knock someone out.
They throw the sack over the border, knock the guard unconscious, and cross into the U.S. while laughing at it, because the country is now a laughingstock."

"The two basic issues with average population density calculations are the arbitrariness of defining borders and the fact that average population density focuses on the density of the average plot of land, not the density observed by the average person. While cities and counties have legally-defined boundaries, the boundaries one selects when comparing metro areas is largely a matter of taste. Since these boundaries are generally set in very low-density exurban areas, the lack of a clear cutoff doesn't lead to significant uncertainty in overall population. However, since a more expansive definition will include more nearly-empty land, it can lower the average population density of the metro area significantly by increasing land area without changing population significantly."

"Wharf Street SW, the 60-foot-wide spine of the development along the river, is D.C.’s first shared street, or what the Dutch call a woonerf. Rather than lanes, it has zones, indicated by subtly different patterns of gray paving: a promenade, with trees closest to the water; the street proper, mixing people and cars in the middle; and then an outdoor-seating zone for restaurants. Although bands of contrasting paving and a metal drainage grate delineate the zones, they mostly blend into each other, and pedestrians rule the whole street. The trick to taming cars in the city, Eckstut says, is not to exclude them outright, but to favor pedestrians so much in the street design that drivers proceed with caution."

"I was used to being the self-distro guy. It was like, ‘Oh great, the Premium truck has blocked half of 14th Street, so I can now park behind him and run in on my delivery.’ But it’s been fascinating and really cool to have access to all of the stuff that distributors can provide. Everyone says, ‘Oh you’re a small fish in a big pond. How do you get their focus? You’ll still have to sell a lot.’ And we do. We’ve always felt it’s important to tell the story of the brand ourselves. But we don’t have to deliver it, which is really nice, and I don’t have to chase checks. Because I can tell you the first guy to get screwed in any situation is the mead guy."

"The exact recipe for gruit was a closely held secret. Three herbs are always mentioned in association with gruits, and a great number of herbs and spices were part of the mix as well, including juniper berries, ginger, caraway, wormwood, anise seed, and others. Generally, the spices were mixed together with malt, flour, or other starchy material, which helped to conceal the true nature of the mix… Little useful information is available on the beer itself. Like all medieval ales, it was likely to be strong, dark, smoky, and possibly a bit sour from long contact with wooden casks. Various strengths of beer were brewed, as with all ages dark or not."

"This is actually where digital compositing started to really show that it could be superior as far as a workflow because you had the opportunity to do quick tests. Once you figured out a recipe, the computer’s going to execute it exactly the same way every single time. You don’t ever have to worry about a human operator with an optical printer applying exactly the right steps in exactly the right order and loading the film in the right place, with the right gels and everything like that. I mean, I still worked with some guys who did that and it was a mind-tedious task, and for the complexity of certain comps that had been done. If there was any error on the lineup sheet, you had to start over from scratch. There was a guy who has since been a visual effects supervisor at ILM, his name’s Dave Carson. But he was working on T2 as a paint fixer, basically. And we only half-jokingly started referring to our pipeline as ‘model, animate, render, composite, Dave.’ Because Dave would just paint out any fixes (that the CG software couldn’t deal with) in an early version of Photoshop, at the very end."

"When Merrill’s relationship dissipated in 2012, he once again turned to his shareholders for advice — this time, in the romance department. 'Under normal circumstances, no one is going to complain when someone is buying flowers or going out to dinner and a movie,' he wrote in an investor letter. 'But as a publicly traded person with a responsibility of productivity to the shareholders, we live under special circumstances. A relationship is likely to affect both [my] productivity and [my] output.' In a resolution titled 'Shareholder Control of Romantic Relationships', Merrill asked his investors if they’d like to take over control of his dating process. It passed with an 86% vote."

"My favorite subplot of the season: watching Paul adjust to the pace and freedom of Mike D'Antoni's offense. You can see his brain working: 'OK, I'm dribbling fast. Look at me go! Oh, here's Clint setting me a screen 35 feet from the hoop. My guy went under! Wait, I'm supposed to shoot, aren't I? But there are 19 seconds on the shot clock and I haven't signaled a play or yelled at anyone yet. Should I really shoot? I guess so. WHEE!' He's like a sheltered college freshman being dragged to his first frat parties. 'The beer is ... free? My parents wouldn't like this. Maybe I'll try one sip.' Five minutes later, he's doing keg stands."

"Many of Brosius’s perfumes are based on scents and experiences meaningful to him. The comforts of cake, pie, and Sunday lunch are compelling when they’re transmuted into perfume, and Brosius doesn’t really mind if they’re interpreted differently than he designed. 'Whenever somebody has a reaction, and they describe what a smell means to them, they’re always absolutely right,' he says."

"Defeating disinformation campaigns is not impossible, but it’s important to remember that the goal is to disrupt and counteract the exploitation of the collected information. Not getting hacked is a start, but it’s only a start. Be prepared to counter the disinformation campaign, and work to hinder its ability to collect anything useable. After all, this strategy worked for Macron in France. Even with access, there was nothing interesting or salacious to leak. Bland emails make for resilient campaigns."

"You wouldn’t believe the number of meetings it can take to decide whether a URL should say /articles/news-and-politics/2017/06/fear-of-the-first-amendment-in-time-of-violent-protests.html, /news-and-politics/2017-07-06/fear-of-the-first-amendment-in-time-of-violent-protests.html, or some combination of those. In a push for simplicity and usability, a new article URL will only have the section (in this case “news-and-politics”) and use the month for its date in the path."

"While Norman and Matthew have taken on more responsibilities, Doug still chases deals. As Washington has become more polished and pricey, he has started to look elsewhere. Last year he plopped down $12.6 million for the tallest building in Buffalo, a vacant skyscraper called One Seneca Tower. Soon after, Jemal got a new parrot — his fourth — and named it Buffalo Bill. (When he told Norman about the building purchase, his son, who handles financing for projects, replied: 'There’s no stopping you. What the f--- are we doing in Buffalo?')"

"It’s been taught that the Pilgrims came because they were seeking religious freedom, but that’s not entirely true, Mr. Loewen said. The Pilgrims had religious freedom in Holland, where they first arrived in the early 17th century. Like those who settled Jamestown, Va., in 1607, the Pilgrims came to North America to make money, Mr. Loewen said. 'They were also coming here in order to establish a religious theocracy, which they did,' he said. 'That’s not exactly the same as coming here for religious freedom. It’s kind of coming here against religious freedom.'"

"Every year, the NBA cuts around 120 players. Once a player is cut, he has two choices: leave the country in hopes of extending his pro career, or stay in the United States and make, relative to the previous year, almost nothing. George told me that according to his calculations the average NBA player will make $3 million in his last season and around $25,000 the next year, mostly by selling his autograph. This sudden nosedive in earning power made no sense to George. How could there be no intermediate step between NBA glory and nearly total obscurity? He says, 'I reject the proposition that someone can be worth millions of dollars in one moment, and the next moment be worth zero.'"

"This video is an explanation of how time travel functions in different popular movies, books, & shows – not how it works 'under the hood', but how it causally affects the perspective of characters’ timelines (who has free will? can you change things by going back to the past or forwards into the future?)."

"The bagel’s origins help explain its relative anonymity in a Jewish-majority country. After World War II, one current of Israeli thought viewed Poland as the shameful shtetl (Jewish town) of their painful past. While it was by no means universal, some Israelis blamed Polish and European Jews who were killed in the Holocaust for being 'sheep led to the slaughter', as the saying went. Holocaust survivors who moved to Israel in the wake of World War II were derogatorily called 'sabon'. or soap, in reference to the rumor that Nazis made soap from the skin of concentration camp prisoners. So instead of re-establishing their culture, European Jews who immigrated largely embraced the Zionist goal of creating a new culture linked to the land of Israel."

"Just as it has become a Dukakis tradition to preserve turkey carcasses, it has become a tradition for some of his friends to drop off their picked-over turkeys at his house. 'I’m collecting if you know anybody. People throw this thing out — it’s crazy!' he says. 'Tell your readers under no circumstances should they do that,' he adds. 'They should use the carcass. And if they don’t want to, tell them to come to 85 Perry Street in Brookline. We’ll make full use of it, believe me.'"

"Later that day, they did publicity shots with the bartenders in the Bitters Room. They let the professional photographers take photos and let me take them without flash. As you can see the bitters tanks have the bottle labels on them. Except in this case, they actually fit."

"Even though I wasn’t drinking, I was determined to keep up with my social obligations, which meant I often found myself in bars, explaining to people that I had sworn off booze for the month. Around Day 12, I found myself in that particular circle of hell known as Hotbird on a Friday night. It was here that my friend Nadja introduced me to her coping mechanism for her own Drynuary: seltzer with a dash of bitters. The idea was, she explained, was to, more or less, fool yourself by ordering a signature cocktail, which conferred a sense of agency, rather than a sense of deprivation. It was quirky, it was refreshing, and it was delicious."

"It’s 2017 and computer graphics have conquered the Uncanny Valley, that strange place where things are almost real... but not quite. After decades of innovation, we’re at the point where we can conjure just about anything with software. The battle for photoreal CGI has been won, so the question is... what happens now?"

"Rule #5: Open that shitty wine. *Let someone drink it.* Let someone drink it! Because, although you as the host — me, I know for a fact that people bring, like, terrible wines to my house, and I don’t fault them for it, I'm just… I’m not a snob, but I’m also not going to drink a big, jammy Cabernet. It’s just not going to happen. But someone will! You’ve got a cousin, you’ve got an uncle, you’ve got a friend that really does not give a fuck. So, open that wine."

"Apple Inc. has sold more than 1.2 billion iPhones since January 2007, when founder Steve Jobs triumphantly claimed, 'Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.' That figure, based on quarterly results that include the 15 distinct models that came out before iPhones 8 and X, means that in terms of units sold, the iPhone is probably more successful than any consumer product ever created."

"First-and-third situations are breeding grounds for gimmick plays in high school. Often, the runner on first will attempt to steal second, hoping to draw a throw that will allow the runner to score from third. But defenses will rarely make that throw, so offenses have designed ways to tempt the defense into going after the trail runner while letting the lead runner sneak home. Sometimes, when the pitch is delivered, the base stealer will stop halfway and try to get in a rundown. Sometimes he'll start walking to second base while the pitcher still has the ball. There's a balk/steal play, where the runner takes off sprinting once the pitcher gets set, the goal being to startle the pitcher so that he'll make an illegal move off the mound in reaction. These plays -- and 'skunk in the outfield' -- all have the same paradoxical premise: It's more valuable to the team that's at bat for the runner to be on first base. If he wanted to go to second, he could just steal. But as long as he's on first -- or, at least, not yet on second -- he might be able to ignite something weird."

"By 1960, the pathogen had all but destroyed the banana crop. 'The Gros Michel was rendered commercially extinct,' said Mr. Koeppel, the banana historian. The breed chosen by the industry to replace it, the Cavendish, was resistant to that particular strain of Panama Disease, but it wasn’t as sturdy as the Gros Michel. It transformed the industry into the one we know today, Mr. Koeppel said, requiring boxes, refrigeration and advanced ripening technology. Today, almost all export bananas in the world are Cavendish. Chosen more for its disease resistance, it is not necessarily the most flavorful variety, according to Mr. Koeppel. He called it the McDonald’s of bananas. In India, where there are hundreds of banana breeds, the Cavendish is known as the hotel banana."

"A lot of guys bring up the team ratings; it’s not just the individual ratings that we hear complaints about. At the wedding reception, Harrison brought up Dallas’ team rating. He was like, 'The team rating is really where we get hosed.' I was like, 'I’m pretty sure you guys were the third-to-last team in the West, though.'"

"So while Xi has ramped up the war on fakes, his campaign will only be successful so long as it doesn’t completely work. 'China’s government has studied the Arab Spring closely, and they understand that social unrest of any kind could turn out to be the spark that sets off the next big upheaval,' said Harris. Which might be why Chinese authorities generally arrest counterfeiters only when they are caught with more than 150,000 RMB ($22,000) worth of fake goods, leaving small and midsize operations relatively undisturbed."

"Imagine the city as a living organism, a body consisting of various systems—respiratory, nervous, skeletal—that share the same space and even intertwine. Now imagine surgery performed on that body by a surgeon who knows the location of only one system, who looks at the body and sees only blood vessels or bones. This is the odd condition of New York—a body subject to what, viewed through a wide lens, looks like perpetual triage. Each year, for repairs or to facilitate construction, the streets are sliced open 200,000 times—an average of almost 550 cuts per day, or 30 per street mile every year."

"By tracing those jokey references back, Ackley found that those exact numbers had also been used in a PRNG featured in SpaceOut, a 1988 program for the X Window System that simulated travel through a star field. When I contacted the author of SpaceOut, he recalled that he had cribbed his PRNG from the second volume of Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, a classic of the discipline. I was able to locate that PRNG in the edition of the book that was published in 1981, though it may also appear in the original edition from a dozen years earlier. This coincidence raises at least two possibilities. The first is that Alex sent Aristocrat a fake proof full of mathematical in-jokes and wagered that the company’s engineers would be too dense to realize that he was putting them on. The second is that Aristocrat has been basing some of its PRNGs, at least in part, on an algorithm that is at least 36 years old and which has long been in the public domain."

"Realizing their mistake, the engineers tried to stop the fault-protection routine, but the newly awakened backup receiver would not register their command. Helpless, they waited for the spacecraft to reason its way back to the original receiver; when it did, and the command went through normally, they were giddy with relief. They were still high-fiving when the working receiver shorted out like a blown fuse. Now it really was dead. Fortunately, the malfunctioning backup receiver was still drawing current. They guessed that its oscillator, which allows it to accept a wide range of frequencies, had quit, essentially shrinking the target for transmissions from Earth. Assuming a much narrower bandwidth, and manually subtracting the Doppler effect, they recalibrated their signal. It worked — but to this day, the same calculation must precede every command. The original receiver remains useless: one engineer’s simple oversight nearly doomed humankind’s lone visit to Uranus and Neptune. 'You like to think you have checks and balances,' Chris Jones, JPL’s chief engineer, who designed Voyager’s fault protection, told me. 'In reality, we all worry about being that person.'"

"What’s really interesting about this list is that Ned Stark (played by Sean Bean) is among in the top 15 after seven seasons, despite the fact *SPOILER* he’s killed off in the first season, in episode 9."

"Anyway, I digress. The salient detail here is that unlike real IP services, bootp and DHCP need to know about ethernet addresses, because after all, it's their job to hear your ethernet address and assign you an IP address to go with it. They're basically the reverse of ARP, except we can't say that, because there's a protocol called RARP that is literally the reverse of ARP. Actually, RARP worked quite fine and did the same thing as bootp and DHCP while being much simpler, but we don't talk about that. The point of all this is that ethernet and IP were getting further and further intertwined. They're nowadays almost inseparable. It's hard to imagine a network interface (except ppp0) without a 48-bit MAC address, and it's hard to imagine that network interface working without an IP address. You write your IP routing table using IP addresses, but of course you know you're lying when you name the router by IP address; you're just indirectly saying that you want to route via a MAC address. And you have ARP, which gets bridged but not really, and DHCP, which is an IP packet but is really an ethernet protocol, and so on."

"We were going to call him Pierre. Then we were going to call him Louis, but Louis turned out to be the tenth most popular boys’ name in France, and the seventh most popular in Paris, where we live, and, even in this age of nominative nonconformity, we worried that he might enter school and find it crawling with more Louises than a chart of Bourbon monarchs. He’d have to become the Stammerer, or the Pious, or the Universal Spider (that was Louis XI, 1423-83, who apparently wove a lot of plots and conspiracies). Then we were going to call him Pierre again, until we realized that his initials would spell out a French-language homophobic slur. For a while, we didn’t care. (It was during this period that I bought the pillow.) Then an acquaintance with the same monogram deemed our choice 'a bit risky', and we decided that maybe we did. (It was during this period that the pillow was delivered.)"

"I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. We both have more money than we ever imagined. And I was like, Can you imagine if someone called us a few years ago and said, “All right, you're going to have this much money when you're this age. What are you gonna do with it?” You would say all sorts of fantastical things, right? No one would say, Oh, I would figure out how to make more money and keep working all the time. Everyone just buys into this, like, Oh, I need to keep making stuff, I need to go make more money. I don't need to make more stuff. I've made a lot of stuff! I'm financially okay. I'm not gonna make stuff just for the sake of making stuff. I want to make stuff ’cause I'm inspired. Right now I don't really feel inspired."

"With the Warriors, Durant had decided to follow LeBron James's example of signing one-year deals—two years, technically, but with a player option for the second year—that effectively prevent him from being traded at all. Together, the two men seem to be modeling a future of the league in which players—stars, anyway—control their own destinies. 'We always had the power, as players,' Durant told me. 'We're just realizing it now. It's like when you wake up—we woke now. And a lot of people didn't want us to be woke. They wanted us to stay in this trance, that we felt like we had to live our life based on what somebody else does. They can move us when they want to, they can sign us when they want to.… We got control of that now.'"

"Walking around, I half-expected to see SQL queries accompanying some of the displays — 'SELECT * FROM books WHERE rating > 4.8 AND pub_year = 2017 ORDER BY number_sold'. Amazon definitely needs to figure out how to get a little weird into their stores, a little of the human touch."

"When Steinfeld wrote 'a friend or someone you might know', he meant anyone—any person who might at some point have labeled your phone number or email or address in their own contacts. A one-night stand from 2008, a person you got a couch from on Craiglist in 2010, a landlord from 2013: If they ever put you in their phone, or you put them in yours, Facebook could log the connection if either party were to upload their contacts. That accumulation of contact data from hundreds of people means that Facebook probably knows every address you’ve ever lived at, every email address you’ve ever used, every landline and cell phone number you’ve ever been associated with, all of your nicknames, any social network profiles associated with you, all your former instant message accounts, and anything else someone might have added about you to their phone book."

"As for the shot itself, there’s nothing you can do. If James can hoist it over Porzingis and get a bucket, then he can get this shot off against anybody. And remember, if you overreact too hard to the jumper, James can blow right by you. But if you see James on the left side, and the game’s in the final minute, and time’s running down ... don’t say we didn’t warn you."

"We understand that paying seventy one U.S. dollars for a twelve-ounce bottle of apple juice may seem crazy at first, but let’s take a closer look at why our juice costs a bit more. First of all, we’ve added fucking red pepper."

"'I had to dip into Sasha’s college fund, so she may have to go to state school her first couple years,' the 44th president of the United States continued. 'But once the game takes off and starts making money, she can transfer wherever she wants.'"

"Starbucks built its empire on the three-dollar iced coffee. Then we invented the term 'cold brew' and had huge success with the four-dollar coffee. Then brunch places started selling cold brews with a brand name attached to them, and pushed it to five. And who can forget our keynote address two years ago, 'Nitro: A Thing Now'. And the six-dollar coffee was born.
But that got me thinking: What’s a number that’s not six, but higher than six?
[Crowd murmurs]"

"After Monday's game, James couldn't resist getting in another shot at Jackson before the night was over. 'They're playing some good basketball,' James said of the Knicks. 'I think Jeff, the coach, Jeff Hornacek is finally -- with the release of the old fella, he's finally allowed to implement what he wants to do on the team and he's showing it's very effective.'"

"Federal grand jury investigations can be like a Game of Thrones plotline. To finish you, federal prosecutors don't necessarily have to prove that you already committed a crime — they can simply play upon your human flaws and get you to finish yourself. High-profile defendants are routinely taken down not based on the initial crime they committed, but by their reckless response to the investigation — they're ended not by the crime, but by the ineffectual coverup. Mueller knows what he's doing, knows that he's dealing with unusually volatile personalities particularly unsuited to patient inaction, and is probably counting on people to react foolishly, self-destructively, and criminally to startling events like a search warrant."

"By the time I had disposed of the original papers, the film would be dry. Taking a strip of a dozen frames at a time, I placed it emulsion side down on a sheet of plate glass and wiped the back with a piece of cotton dipped in acetone until the heavy celluloid was dissolved and only the thin emulsion remained. I now cut the emulsion strips into individual frames and separated the negatives which were to be sent out from the two copies to be kept in reserve against the possibility of loss in transit. The reserve copies I put in a match box or wrapped in a paper. I tied this tiny package on the end of a string and suspended it through a hole in the wall under the kitchen sink, sealing the hole afterward so the end of the string was not visible. It would be only through the unluckiest of coincidences that this cache would be discovered."

"Criminals are frequently opportunistic and easily dissuaded when their existing capabilities prove insufficient. Unfortunately, they are motivated, strangely persistent, and their capabilities are usually sufficient. While their capabilities might not be particularly impressive, they will try every single one against every target. And when they get a new capability, they’ll go back and try it against everyone again."

"The problem isn’t Apple’s tax structure, it’s U.S. law. You can argue that Apple should voluntarily pay more in taxes than they’re legally obligated to, but no one who holds such views would ever get hired as a finance executive at a large publicly held company."